Documents / Hearing transcript
This is the printed record of a July 29, 1968 symposium on unidentified flying objects held by the Committee on Science and Astronautics of the U.S. House of Representatives, chaired by Rep. J. Edward Roush. The committee heard statements from six scientists: J. Allen Hynek, James E. McDonald, Carl Sagan, Robert L. Hall, James A. Harder and Robert M. L. Baker. It also printed papers from Donald Menzel, Stanton Friedman, Frank Salisbury and others. Hynek argued that puzzling UFO reports from competent witnesses deserve serious scientific study.
“The Advance”52 pages
138 112° 10'). Mr. Newhouse, a Chief Warrant Officer in the U.S. Navy,* was in transit from Washington, D.C. to Portland, Oregon. He, his wife and their two children were making the trip by car. Shortly after passing through the city of Tremonton, his wife noticed a group of strange shining objects in the air off towards the eastern horizon. She called them to her husband's attention and prevailed upon him to stop the car. When he got out, he observed the objects (twelve to fourteen of them) to be directly overhead and milling about. He described them as "gun metal colored objects shaped like two saucers, one inverted on top of the other." He estimated that they subtended "about the same angle as B-29's at 10,000 feet" (about half a degree—i.e., about the angular diameter of the moon). Next, he ran to the trunk of his car, took out his Bell and Howell Automaster 16mm movie camera equipped with a 3" tele- photo lens, loaded it, focused it at infinity and began shooting. There was no reference point above the horizon so he was unable to estimate absolute size, speed or distance. He reports that one of the objects reversed its course and pro- ceeded away from the rest of the group; he held the camera still and allowed this single object to pass across the field of view of the camera, picking it up later in its course. He repeated this for three passes. During the filMing, Newhouse changed the iris stop of the camera from f/8 to f/16. The density of the film can be seen to change markedly at a point about 30% through the sequence. The camera was operated at 16 fps. The color film (Daylight Kodachrome) after processing was submitted to his superiors. The•Navy forwarded the film to the USAF-ATIC where the film was studied for several months. According to Al Chop (then with ATIC and presently with DAC) Air Force personnel were convinced that the objects were not airplanes; on the other hand the hypothesis that the camera might have been out of focus and the objects soaring gulls could neither be confirmed nor denied. Mr. Chop's remarks are essentially substantiated by Capt. Edward Ruppelt, reference (1) then head of Project "Blue Book" for ATIC. A 35mm reprint of the New'house "Utah" film was submitted to Douglas Air- craft Company for examination. Visual study of the reprints on the Recordak and astronomical plate measuring engine revealed the following: The film com- prises about 1,200 frames; on most of the frames there appear many round white dots, some elliptical. The dots often seem clustered in constellations, or forma- tions which are recognizable for as long as seventeen seconds. A relative motion plot (obtained from an overlay vellum trace on the Recordak) of two typical formations are presented. The objects seem to cluster in groups of two's and three's. On some frames they flare up and then disappear from view in 0.25 sec- onds or less and sometimes they appear as a randomly scattered "twinkling" of dots. The dot images themselves show no structure; they are white and have no color fringes. Examination under a microscope shows the caimera to be well focused as the edges of the images are sharp and clear on many of the properly exposed frames (of the original print). Angular diameters range from about 0.001,6 to 0.000,4 radians. Their pattern of motion is essentially a curvilinear milling about. Sometimes the objects appear to circle about each other. There are no other objects in the field of view whieh might give a clue as to the absolute motion of the cluster. In the overlay trace, the frame of reference is determined by a certain object whose relative motion during a sequence of frames remains rather constant. This object is used as a reference point and the lower edge of the frame as abscissa. Assuming the camera to have been kept reasonably uncanted, the abscissa would be horizontal and the ordinate vertical. In the overlay trace, the particular frame itself is used as the reference. Assuming the camera was held steady (there is an unconscious tendency to pan with a moving object) the coordinate system is quasi-fixed. It is realized that both of these coordinate systems are in ac- tuality moving, possibly possessing both velocity and acceleration. No altitude or azimuth determination can be made because of lack of back- ground. The only measurable quantities of interest are therefore the relative angular distances between the objects and their time derivatives. Graphs of two typical time variations of relative angular separation and velocity are in- cluded (in Baker and Makemson (1967)). The relative angular velocity is seen to vary from zero to 0.006,5 radians per second. The relative angular acceleration had a maximum value of 0.003,6 radians per second squared. Supposing the *At the time he had already logged some 2,200 hours as a chief photographer with the Navy.
Hearing transcript, from the govinfo collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is above. 256 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.